Conventionally, a system for administrating objects is tasked with administering various information processing resources, such as an information processing system, a network element, or quite simply applications software. To do so, a dialog is established by the agency of a predetermined standard administrative protocol and through the network, by means of requests sent by the administration system to the information processing resources and responses to these requests made by the information processing resources involved to the administration system. To authorize this dialog, an information processing device especially provided to facilitate performing this task is implanted in each information processing resource. This device is in fact the equivalent of the administration system for the equipment that supports the information processing resource to be administered. These devices are of various types, depending on the type of administrative objects they support and on the administrative protocol they use to communicate with the administration system. One example of such a device is provided by the simple network management protocol agent SNMP, which is described in the document "Simple Network Management Protocol--Internet Working Group Request for Comments 1157", May 1990, and which uses the object model and the administrative protocol defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The SNMP agents support administrative objects standardized by IETF and/or what are known as proprietary objects which are defined by the vendors of the resources to be administered (equipment manufacturers, software developers, etc.). Because the same equipment, and in particular an information processing system, can support various resources to be administered, it is essential to have modular agents capable of handling various sets of objects, called administration or information bases or MIBs (for management information base), representing the various resources to be administered in the equipment. Initially, the agents were developed entirely as a function of the objects to be supported, and administering a new resource was a tedious process that required adding a new MIB and hence required new development to expand the corresponding agent. With a view to simplifying such expansions, various mechanisms have recently been defined. In a first step, the simplification has consisted of defining program interfaces among the agents to enable dialog between the core (the common portion, independent of the objects, that handles the dialog with the administration system, error handling, formatting the data, and so forth) and various MIBs of the device, which has made it possible to facilitate the development of new objects. Hence when there is a need to administer a new resource with a given agent by a given protocol, this resource must be modelized, which translates into a set of objects or MIBs to be defined by using the modes of definition provided for by the standards. In this approach, as described for instance in the document entitled "CISCO MIB", CISCO Systems, Inc., November 1989, the objects are defined in accordance with the methods or the formal procedure of the standard, but the objects themselves are not standard, and the result is that each manufacturer develops a set of objects specific to him. Under these conditions, the dialog between an administration system and a plurality of resources of different manufacturers is impossible to do automatically and requires the use of a plurality of administration systems, each one managing a set of resources specific to one manufacturer and requiring the possibly time-consuming and expensive development of additional software to enable manipulating and reconfiguring virtually all of a device for processing the information employing the agents.
Moreover, manufacturers and users show a strong inclination toward developing an increasingly large number of MIBs as well as integrating all the existing MIBs, which given the heterogeneity of the various resources singularly complicates the task. With a view to at least partially solving this growing problem, provision has been made in a second step for the implanting of MIBs in subagents, carrying out dialog with a generic agent by a defined protocol. In that case, implanting new objects requires only the development of a subagent. One such architecture is used by IBM, for example, and is described in the document "SNMP MUX Protocol and MIB", by Marshall T. Rose, May 1991; an SMUX protocol is used for dialog between the core and the subagents of the device. The SMUX protocol was chosen because of its simplicity of development, but it has a major disadvantage because it cannot coexist with other structures of agents and it requires the use of this technique and hence the develop of other subagents (dialoging by this SMUX protocol) to authorize the processing of information specific to the resources of other manufacturers.
Heretofore present, the problems resulting from the transparency of the administration of information processing resources of different origins have been significant.